NOVEMBER 16 – TIME is “rapidly running out” for a football club to stake their claim to move to the Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Games, a senior London official warned during a visit to Barcelona today.
David Higgins, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority, said neither West Ham United or Tottenham had responded to previous talks and now designers were preparing the final design of the stadium in Stratford, East London.
There is a still a possibility of West Ham moving however as Eggert Magnusson, the Icelandic businessman behind a takeover bid for the club, is understood to be keen to meet Olympic chiefs at an early opportunity if his attempt is successful.
Magnusson is expected to make a formal offer within the next couple of days, once the due diligence process has been completed, and he is also aware that the stadium would have to maintain a serious track-and-field legacy use after the Games.
Higgins said the stadium designers would spend next year drawing up the final plans and that a club would need to register their interest within “a matter of months”.
Speaking on a fact-finding visit to 1992 Olympic host city Barcelona, Higgins said: “We have appointed Team McAlpine, they are doing much more detailed designs, and work on the stadium starts in 2008.
“We met the major football clubs, Spurs and West Ham, in August and said ‘if you have a commercial proposal to put to us you need to come back to us soon’. We have not heard back from anyone.
“To influence the current design, time is running out rapidly. They can come back after the Olympics and put something in later on, there will be flexibility built in but will be more expensive.
“To influence the current design, time is very, very limited to do that.”
The future use of the stadium was also discussed by the Olympic Board yesterday – London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe, Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, London mayor Ken Livingstone and British Olympic Association chairman Colin Moynihan.
Coe said the board re-stated their position that any future use had to incorporate a major athletics function for the venue after the Games.
“The position is the same – this is a stadium which will have track and field legacy and the responsibility now is to scope out a project that allows us to look at all sorts of supportive and creative streams of income and interest in that stadium,” said Coe.
“We have not had a coherent offer at all [from football] so far.